God said to Moses: " I am that I am " (1),
meaning either that he exists in an eternal present, or outside of time,
which is different. But is it really possible for something other than time to exist?
And could we have some kind of intuition of it, which we would be incapable
of expressing clearly without having been guided by our science, or by something
else which would be just as much outside the bounds of our science as it
would be outside our time?

Already, scientists seem to have a need to find something of this kind. Physicists
like Hawking, looking for a unified theory combining quantum physics with gravitation,
find themselves talking about " an imaginary time " in order to be able to add up
the sum over histories of particles (2) which are not situated
in the " real " time in which we live. Of course, what we mean here is being
able to measure time with the help of " imaginary " numbers, whereas
" real " time is measured with the help of " real "
numbers (3).

Now these may be mathematical tricks, but it is precisely thanks to mathematics
that science has arrived at the present space-time concept, and having acquired
this precious paradigm, and over centuries, why should we flinch before a few courageous
extrapolations? Before Einstein the notion of space-time was completely absent from
our field of consciousness: we couldn't even imagine it. Could it not be that we are
looking for a new " region ", the " out of time " which
is to space-time what space-time is to time (4),
a region in which our mathematical equations would no longer work?

In the quotation above (3), Hawking says
" A scientific theory is just a mathematical model we make to
describe our observations: it exists only in our minds. So it is
meaningless to ask: Which is real, " real " or " imaginary "
time? It is simply a matter of which is the more useful description. "
So, mathematics would not seem to have a monopoly on the representation of the
universe. It is this kind of conclusion, reached by a great scientist, which
makes us realise to what extent our universe is becoming increasingly a mental
construct for us, and which explains why Berkeley (1685–1753), who has recently
been hailed as " the precursor of Mach and Einstein ", is also
frequently referred to in discussions about the philosophical consequences of quantum physics.

Berkeley expressed his philosophy of " subjective idealism " by his
condensed formula " to be, is to be perceived ", which is nothing less
than that of Bohr as expressed in the Copenhagen interpretation " the only real thing
is an observed thing ". So, the name of Bohr should logically have figured
after that of Einstein in the title conferred on Berkeley. Here again, we have
an " out of time " concept, since it crops up throughout our history,
somewhere between philosophy and physics, as the " cave " of Plato,
the " empiricism " of Locke, the "subjective idealism "
of Berkeley and in the "Copenhagen interpretation" of Bohr.

As for Einstein, he confirms this when he says " as far as we convinced
physicists are concerned, the distinction between past, present and future
is just an illusion, even if it is a tenacious one (5) ".
This makes me wonder: in effect, Einstein doesn't believe in time either,
when we get to the bottom of things. For the living creatures which we are however,
the arrow of time is obligatory, flying straight from birth to death, with no
symmetry and no turning back. So time should be what we consume in order to live.
And then again, there's this " out-of-time " thing. This emerging
paradigm which is " in the air ", and which I notice according
to the Scriptures that both God and our greatest scientists seem to have
the same idea about, and I also notice that these scientists, when they
get onto the subject, seem drawn to talk about God.

As an artist, I asked myself whether in some way I didn't also
perceive this " out-of-time ", albeit in a fleeting way, in the act of
creation. In order to see whether this was true, I observed what " the
others " had done throughout history, from the point of view of the result
obtained.

Science goes on, as progress is achieved, and today's scientists are no longer
interested in yesterday's outdated theories. Whereas art, the great, the sublime,
the art of undeniable masterpieces, seems to be outside of time, and particularly
outside of any kind of progress, since at this level, we can no longer say that
our descendants, because they come after us and do something new, do any better
than their ancestors. " New " does not necessarily mean " better ".
When, for example, we realise that the Lascaux cave man had made a drawing of an
animal of the same quality as that of Leonardo da Vinci some 20,000 years before
the great master was born, then we see that in this case there has been no
progress in art, whereas in science there has been progress over the same period
of time. In painting, impressionism does not represent progress compared to
classicism. It is simply something else. However, if progress in art does not
exist, regression does, as witnessed by the present fashion for " non-art "
or " the death of art " present in our decadent civilisation.

In true art, it is as if time did not exist, as if time were a hypothesis
which was not necessary for its practice. Perhaps then, in our search for
artistic creation, fused with scientific creation, we shall discover the door
to the " out of time ", to this new, and as yet unexplored region.

This is why so many creative artists are no longer hesitating to make what might
appear to be a step backwards to some of their contemporaries – which doesn't
really matter in fact, as it is the result which counts, the opening of new
avenues (6).

Hawking says: " ...the discovery that the speed of light appeared the same
to every observer, no matter how he was moving, led to the theory of relativity –
and in that, one had to abandon the idea that there was a unique absolute time.
Instead, each observer would have his own measure of time as recorded by a clock
that he carried: clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.
Thus time became a more personal concept, relative to the observer who measured
it (7) ".

A personal time! Here's a new paradigm! So, if I stay with the metaphor, as an artist,
in the daily exercise of my creation, the fact that no progress is observed in art
would characterise the daily work of my mental processes, like a sort of constant
of my " personal imaginary time ", whereas the scientist's time,
as a result of the progress he makes in science, would be situated in a
" personal real time ".

This means that fashion,
because it is transient, would bring about an irreversible decay, to the point
of eventual and perhaps, eternal, loss. This explains why Asian art, has for
centuries remained practically identical, whereas western art seems to have been
bent on a perpetual and breathless quest for novelty. What then, are the
criteria which will make a work of art an eternal object instead of something
obsolete? How is it that we don't bother to date Khmer, Chinese or
Japanese art to within a century or so, whereas an outmoded
piece of western art has no more than a vague anecdotal interest for us?

When we talk about time, our
Scriptures and our Physicists also mention its beginning and its end: it is more
difficult to imagine its beginning than its end, especially the idea that there
was no time before the beginning of time. Imagining the end is easier in a
universe as chaotic as ours, with the kind of collisions of galaxies which we
sometimes observe. But why should there be this idea of the end of History?
Our Scriptures, whose prophecies have until now achieved the highest possible
score concerning the Creation, the Universe and the Cosmos, all repeat the same
message about a cataclysmic End of Time. We, the living, wonder about the
usefulness of the end of time. How (on earth) could time be no longer of any
use, or at least unnecessary, how could it have no reason for being? And
why should this end of time be cataclysmic? Of course at our infinitely
small human scale, the disappearance of our infinitely great universe can only
be cataclysmic. Moreover, whenever man is terrified, he feels guilty and begins
to fantasize. In such circumstances he will certainly experience the cataclysm
as a punishment resulting from a judgement.

But just as the text from
Genesis would seem to be confirmed by the present day " Big Bang "
theory, the cataclysmic end of time which is prophesised, could turn out to be a
slowing down of the rate of expansion of the universe, prior to a " Big
Crunch ", which would be the opposite of the Big Bang. This would pose the
same kind of question as that concerning the beginning of the universe, which is
essentially that posed philosophically by Leibniz: " why does
something exist rather than nothing? ". There we would have the
symmetry between the why of the beginning and the why of the end. Probably, if
we find the answer to the first, we shall logically perhaps arrive at the answer
to the second, to the extent to which the life of a chaotic system is closely
linked to the conditions of its origin.

So, finally, as it is impossible to express in words what I perceive in the " out
of time " region, it is with the arrow of time, or
outside of time, through my paintings, which are like ideograms, that I
express it.